'Yer'11 need it. I keeps 'im in out o' the sun, which would surely fry 'is eyes. But it's dark in the back o' the shack there. And this time o' evenin' even darker in 'is cage.' When she looked uncertain, didn't move, he cocked his head on one side and said, 'Er, yer just follers the signs, is all.'
Liz looked at him, hefted the torch, said, 'You want me to go alone?'
'Can't very well get lost!' he said. But then, grumblingly, he hobbled out from behind the makeshift bar. 'It's these old pins o' mine,' he said. 'See, they don't much like ter go. But yer right — can't let a little lady go wanderin' about in the dark on 'er own. So just you foller me, miss. Just you foller old Bruce.' And then they were gone.
Jake took a small pager out of his pocket and switched it on. Now if Liz got in trouble she only had to press the button on her own beeper and he would know it… and vice versa. For in this game it was just as likely that he would be the one to make a wrong move.
Those were his thoughts as he stepped silently behind the bar, and passed through a second bead curtain hanging from the timbered ceiling to the floor. And as easily and as quickly as that he was into a horizontal mineshaft, and almost as quickly into something far less mundane…
Liz had followed the old man (Bruce? Hell of a lot of Australians called Bruce, she thought. There had to >e at least as many as there were Johns in London) along the foot of the knoll to the lesser shack that leaned into an almost sheer cliff face.
It was quite dark now, and the torch he'd given her wasn't nearly working on full charge. The batteries must be just about dead. Of course, knowing the place as he did, that wouldn't much concern the old boy, but it concerned Liz. And despite that she followed slowly and carefully in old Bruce's footsteps — mainly to give Jake the time he needed to look the place over — still she stumbled once or twice over large rocks or into this, that, or the other pothole. But, in truth, much of her stumbling was a ploy, too, so that it was perhaps a good thing after all that the torch was almost spent. She thought so at the outset, anyway.
Until eventually: 'Here we are,' the old man said, turning a key in a squealing lock and opening an exterior screen door. Beyond that a second door stood ajar; and as old Bruce, if that really was his name, reached out an incredibly long arm to one side of Liz to push it fully open — at the same time managing to bundle her inside — so she recognized the smell of a lair.
It was a primal thing, something that lies deep in the ancestral memories of every human being: to be able to recognize the habitat of a dangerous animal or animals. The musty, feral smell of a cavern where something dwells — or perhaps an attic where bats have hibernated for untold years — or maybe the reptile house in a zoo.
But there are smells and smells, and this wasn't like anything Liz had ever come across before; or perhaps it was simply the tainted, composite smell of all of them. Until suddenly she realized that it wasn't just a smell — wasn't simply a smell — but her talent coming into play, and that the stench wasn't in her nostrils alone but also in her mind.'
And then she had to wonder about its origin, the focus or point of emanation of this alien taint. Was it the shack — or the steel-barred, wall-to-wall cell it contained — or perhaps the night-black tunnel beyond the bars, with its as yet unseen, unknown 'creechur'… or could it possibly be old 'Brace' himself?
There came a sound from the darker depths of the horizontal mine shaft. And just as there are smells and smells, so are there sounds and sounds. Liz gasped, aimed her torch-beam into the darkness back there, and saw movement. A flowing, gathering, approaching darkness in the lesser dark around; an inkblot of a figure, taking on shape as it came, bobbing, wafting on a draft of poisonous air from wherever and whatever lay beyond. And it had luminous yellow eyes — slanted as a beast's, and yet intelligent, not-quite-feral — that held her fixed like a rabbit in a headlight's beam!
But only for a moment. Then—
'You.'' Liz transferred the torch to her left hand, dipped her right hand into a pocket and came out with a modified Baby Browning, used her thumb to release the safety and aimed it at the old man… or at the empty space where he had been. While from outside in the night, she heard the grating of his booted feet,
his now obscene chuckle, and the squeal of a key turning in the exterior screen door's lock as he shut her in.
Hell! But this could quite literally be hell! Along with her talent — held back far too long by her desire not to alert anyone or anything to her real purpose here — Liz's worst fears were now fully mobilized, realized. She knew what the creechur in the mineshaft was, knew what it could do. But even now she wasn't entirely helpless.
Tucking the torch under her arm, she found her beeper and pressed its alarm button… at the precise moment that it commenced transmitting Jake's own cry for help!
The shock of hearing that rapid beep! beep! beeping from her pocket almost made Liz drop the torch; she somehow managed to hold on to it, held her hands together, pointed the gun and the torch both through the inch- thick bars of the cage. But as the weak beam swept the bars, it picked out something that she hadn't previously noticed; there had been little enough time to notice anything. The cage had a door fastened with a chain and stout padlock — but the padlock hung on the inside, the other side, where it dangled from the hoop of its loose shackle!
She knew what she must do: reach through the bars, drive home the shackle to close the padlock. A two- handed job. Again she put the torch under her arm, fumbled the gun back into her pocket. Then, in the crawling, tingling, living semi-darkness, Liz thrust her trembling hands between the bars… and all of the time she was aware of the thing advancing towards her, its slanted, sulphurous eyes alive on her… and the beeper issuing its urgent, staccato mayday like a small, terrified animal… and on top of all this the sudden, nightmarish notion: But what if this thing has the key to the padlock!?
At that moment it was Liz Merrick who felt like some small, terrified, trapped animal — but a human animal. While the thing striding silently, ever closer to her along the shaft was anything but human, though it might have been not so long ago.
It was almost upon her; she smelled the hot stench of its breath!
CHAPTER TWO Dark Denizens
Liz had squeezed her eyes shut in a desperate effort to locate the padlock. Now she opened them…
… And it was there, it was there! Its face, caught in the upward-slanting beam of yellow light from the torch in her arm-pit, looked down on her! And:
'Ahhh!' It — or he, the 'creechur' — sighed. 'A girl. No, a woooman. And a fresh one. How very good to meet you here.' How very… provident. AM!' And as simply as that his cold, cold hands took the padlock from hers, freed it from the chains, and let it fall with a clank to the dirt floor…
24
Meanwhile, Jake Cutter had proceeded maybe a hundred yards down the gradually sloping shaft, deep into the earth. The shaft was quite obviously the entrance to an old mine; the walls and roof were timbered, and there were sleepers and rusty, narrow-gauge rails in the fairly uneven floor. In places there was some evidence of past cave-ins, where holes in the ceiling and boulders on the floor told their own story. Since the surviving supports seemed stout enough, Jake wasn't worried for his safety in that respect.
But in one other respect, he was. And he kept finding himself wishing that right now he wasn't somewhere but rather someone else — despite that he would usually prefer not to be! All very confusing and paradoxical, but it was something which had only ever' happened twice, and then in the most extreme of circumstances. And for the time being Jake was only Jake Cutter.
Such were his thoughts when the narrow but adequate beam of his pencil-slim pocket torch picked out the first of several side tunnels, shafts that radiated off from the main, the original mineshaft.
Until now the floor had borne a thick coating of dust and sand, much of which had settled against the walls. Towards the centre, however, and between the rails, most of this had been
scuffed away, presumably by the recent passage of several or many persons. But persons going where? Of course, the old proprietor might be using this place as a warehouse or stock room; indeed, back where the shaft
